<abstract>This guide helps developers understand how to use the Gentoo

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Overlays service.</abstract>

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<license/>

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<version>1.0</version>

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<date>2006-07-29</date>

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<chapter>

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<title>Introduction</title>

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<section>

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<title>Audience</title>

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<body>

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<p>This document has been written for Gentoo developers and Gentoo staff members. If you are a Gentoo user, or you just want to start downloading and using overlays, please see <urilink="/proj/en/overlays/userguide.xml">the Gentoo Overlays User Guide</uri> instead.</p>

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</body>

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</section>

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<section>

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<title>What is overlays.gentoo.org?</title>

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<body>

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<p><urilink="http://overlays.gentoo.org">overlays.gentoo.org</uri> provides social workspaces to allow Gentoo projects, developers and users to collaborate together on tomorrow's Gentoo packages. We do this by hosting overlays for Gentoo projects, and overlays for Gentoo developers.</p>

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</body>

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</section>

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<section>

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<title>Who Can Use overlays.gentoo.org?</title>

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<body>

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<p>Any Gentoo project, or Gentoo developer, can have their own overlay hosted on overlays.gentoo.org, with the RSS feed from the changelog included on <urilink="http://overlays.gentoo.org">the overlays.gentoo.org homepage</uri>.</p>

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<p>Any Gentoo staff member or user (ie, anyone who doesn't have write access to

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the main Portage package tree) can download and use the contents of any hosted

<p>There are two types of overlay - "project" overlays, and "developer"

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overlays. The only difference between them is responsibility and

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accountability.</p>

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<impo>Before requesting an overlay, please make sure that you have read our <urilink="/proj/en/overlays/policy.xml">Policy Document</uri>. It clearly sets out what's allowed and what is not, and what your responsibilities will be.</impo>

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</body>

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</section>

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<section>

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<title>Project Overlays</title>

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<body>

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<p>"Project" overlays are overlays for official Gentoo projects. A good

<p>We have installed several Trac macros, which we hope will make your wiki even more useful to you. If you come across any additional macros that you'd like to see installed, please let us know, and we'll take a look at them.</p>

<p>Your overlay comes with <urilink="http://subversion.tigris.org">Subversion</uri>, a modern alternative to CVS. The advantages of Subversion over CVS include real versioning of directories, full changeset support, and it's much easier to do branching if you need to. The main disadvantage of Subversion is that it is slower than CVS, and that a local Subversion checkout requires more disk space.</p>

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<p>If you have never used Subversion before, the <urilink="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/">online book</uri> is an excellent way to learn Subversion. You can buy it in dead-tree format too if you prefer.</p>